Days Without End (Days Without End #1) - Sebastian Barry Page 0,34

Mostly cruel and thoughtless but there was the seam of something else unnamed. I was just alone with him looking at his shrunken face in the half-light. The thin eyes glittering yet. His disease had blacked up his face. He spoke about Caught-His-Horse-First and how he hoped we’d get him eventually. I said we sure would keep a weather eye out. I was thinking maybe now our accounts were balanced but I didn’t say that. Then the sergeant seemed to go wandering in his mind a little back to the Detroit of his youth when his brother was beginning to come good in business and then he killed a man. Missed the noose by a mere shadow of words because there wasn’t witnesses. Fell into melancholy, was what the sergeant said. He seemed a different man talking about his brother. Said his mother was a hard old woman and his father were killed in 1813 fighting Injuns along the frontier of those times, Kentucky. Said his only regret was he married a woman that didn’t like him and that he never divorced the harridan and tried for a second Mrs Wellington. The sergeant! Well all this surprised me, let me tell you. But a dying man can just say what he likes. It don’t have to be true.

Then he dies. At least we don’t have to listen to his singing no more, says Lige Magan.

Also at this time Mrs Neale had took in the captured Indian bairns into her school. Turns out Caught-His-Horse-First’s daughter was called Winona which in the Sioux language means First-born Girl according to Mr Graham the interpreter. She might have been six or seven then but who could tell because their record keeping was about as good as my own crowd in Ireland.

Well I weren’t the only soul thinking maybe the books was balanced between the chief and the blessed army. The sergeant weren’t too long in his humble grave before Mr Graham received some sort of communication and we was told that Caught-His-Horse-First was wishing to give us a visit. The colonel and the major went into confab about it and it was decided to entertain this visit as maybe it might lead to better times between us and the tribes. Everything was awful stirred up and the colonel feared an out-and-out war on the plains, that’s what he said. And the major maybe had his mind back in the time when the chief had saved us on our hungry march and although he was putting the massacre into the mix he was also mindful of the work of the late sergeant in slaughtering the chief ’s wives and son. The major in his heart always strove for justice I do believe and as he had a properly low opinion of man in the main he could allow a great margin of leeway when it was indicated. Troopers theyselves often when about the world were given to sprees and drinking, and there was oftentimes violent upflares even in camp that resulted in more than bruises and uproar. But just as the drear Black Hills were said to be speckled with gold, he believed that man was likewise. Also he had the mighty civilising medicine of Mrs Neale, a woman who might have been a preacher had she not been cloven. The mixture of beauty and religion in her could make troopers faint with what can only be reckoned love. Maybe lust too.

If the sergeant had been still overground it’s not likely he would have stood for this occasion. But the sergeant were now tendering his name I should think with trembling hand at the Pearly Gates.

The day appointed was cold, sere, and dark. The river before our fort looked dank and sad, what John Cole called the ‘hairless’ ground all about us worried by stray smears of ice and snow. A goodly number of buildings had sprung up outside the protection of the fort. There was a saddlery premises painted in a dying green, and the office of the Indian agent was stuck up beside the fort wall like a piece of poetry amid the plain story of everywhere else. Plasterers and carpenters had come up all the way from Galveston, Texas for some reason to fit out that little palace. As for our fort it were fairly falling down in places but the colonel kept it shipshape as funds would let him. The big gates with its old arch of lodgepole trees seemed to